FitsMap: A simple, lightweight tool for displaying interactive astronomical image and catalog data

Abstract

The visual inspection of image and catalog data continues to be a valuable aspect of astronomical data analysis. As the scale of astronomical image and catalog data continues to grow, visualizing the data becomes increasingly difficult. In this work, we introduce FitsMap, a simple, lightweight tool for visualizing astronomical image and catalog data. FitsMap uses well-understood image tiling techniques and a novel catalog tiling technique to serve gigapixel images with catalogs containing tens of millions of sources using only a simple web server. Further, the web-based visualizations can be viewed performantly on mobile devices. FitsMap is implemented in Python and is open source (https://github.com/ryanhausen/fitsmap).